China's bold move to go back to school

Sanya: Zhang Xiaoping's mother dropped out of school after sixth grade. Her father, one of 10 children, never attended.

But Zhang, 20, is part of a new generation of Chinese taking advantage of a national effort to produce college graduates in numbers the world has never seen before.

A pony-tailed junior at a new university in southern China, Zhang has a major in English. But her unofficial minor is American pop culture, which she absorbs by watching episodes of television shows like "The Vampire Diaries" and "America's Next Top Model" on the Internet.

It is all part of her highly specific ambition: to work someday for a Chinese automaker and provide the cultural insights and English fluency the company needs to supply the next generation of fuel-efficient taxis that New York City plans to choose in 2021.

"It is my dream," she said, "and I will devote myself wholeheartedly to it."

Even if her dream is only dorm-room reverie, China has tens of millions of Zhangs - bright young people whose aspirations and sheer numbers could become potent economic competition for the West in decades to come.

China is making a $250 billion-a-year investment in what economists call human capital. Just as the United States helped build a white-collar middle class in the late 1940s and early 1950s by using the GI Bill to help educate millions of World War II veterans, the Chinese government is using large subsidies to educate tens of millions of young people as they move from farms to cities.

The aim is to change the current system, in which a tiny, highly educated elite oversees vast armies of semi-trained factory workers and rural labourers. China wants to move up the development curve by fostering a much more broadly educated public, one that more closely resembles the multifaceted labour forces of the United States and Europe.

It is too early to know how well the effort will pay off.

While potentially enhancing China's future as a global industrial power, an increasingly educated population poses daunting challenges for its leaders. With the Chinese economy downshifting in the past year to a slower growth rate, the country faces a glut of college graduates with high expectations and limited opportunities.

Much depends on whether China's authoritarian political system can create an educational system that encourages the world-class creativity and innovation that modern economies require, and that can help generate enough quality jobs.

China also faces formidable difficulties in dealing with widespread corruption, a sclerotic political system, severe environmental damage, inefficient state-owned monopolies and other problems. But if these issues can be surmounted, a better-educated labour force could help China become an ever more formidable rival to the West.

"It will move China forward in its economy, in scientific innovation and politically, but the new rising middle class will also put a lot of pressure on the government to change," said Wang Huiyao, the director general of the Centre for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based research group.

To the extent that China succeeds, its educational leap forward could have profound implications in a globalized economy in which a growing share of goods and services is traded across international borders. Increasingly, college graduates all over the world compete for similar work, and the boom in higher education in China is starting to put pressure on employment opportunities for college graduates elsewhere - including in the United States.

China's current five-year plan, through 2015, focuses on seven national development priorities, many of them new industries that are in fashion among young college graduates in the West. They are alternative energy, energy efficiency, environmental protection, biotechnology, advanced information technologies, high-end equipment manufacturing and so-called new energy vehicles, like hybrid and all-electric cars.

China's goal is to invest up to 10 trillion renminbi, or $1.6 trillion, to expand those industries to represent 8 per cent of economic output by 2015, up from 3 per cent in 2010.

At the same time, many big universities are focusing on existing technologies in industries where China poses a growing challenge to the West.

Beijing Geely University, a private institution founded in 2000 by Li Shufu, the chairman of the automaker Geely, already has 20,000 students studying a range of subjects, but with an emphasis on engineering and science, particularly auto engineering.

Li also endowed and built Sanya University, a liberal arts institution with 20,000 students where Zhang is a student, and opened a 5,000-student vocational community college in his hometown, Taizhou, to train skilled blue-collar workers.

China's growing supply of university graduates is a talent pool that global corporations are eager to tap.

"If they went to China for brawn, now they are going to China for brains," said Denis F. Simon, one of the best-known management consultants specializing in Chinese business.

Multinationals including IBM, General Electric, Intel and General Motors have each hired thousands of graduates from Chinese universities.

"We're starting to see leaders coming out of China, and the talent to lead," said Kevin Taylor, the president of Asia, Mideast and Africa operations at BT, formerly British Telecom.

Sheer numbers make the educational push by China, a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, potentially breathtaking. In the last decade, China doubled the number of colleges and universities, to 2,409.

By quadrupling its output of college graduates in the past decade, China now produces 8 million graduates a year from universities and community colleges. That is already far ahead of the United States in number - but not as a percentage. With only about one-fourth the number of China's citizens, the United States each year produces 3 million college and junior college graduates.

By the end of the decade, China expects to have nearly 195 million community college and university graduates - compared with no more than 120 million in the United States then.

Volume is not the same as quality, of course. And some experts in China contend that the growth of classroom slots in higher education has outstripped the supply of qualified professors and instructors.

Xu Qingshan, the director of the Institute for Higher Education Research at Wuhan University, said that many university administrators seek the fastest possible growth in enrolments to maximize the size and revenue of their institutions, even though this may overstretch a limited number of talented professors.

"While people receive a good education," he said, "there are significant gaps compared with the advanced international level."

Giles Chance, a long-time consultant in China who is now a visiting professor at Peking University, said that many of the tens of millions of new Chinese college graduates might find jobs at manufacturers but did not have the skills to compete in big swaths of the American economy - particularly in services like health care, sales or consumer banking.

"A Chinese graduate from a second-tier university is not the equal of an American in language skills and cultural familiarity," he said.

The overarching question for China's colleges is whether they can cultivate innovation on a wide scale - vying with the United States' best and brightest in multimedia hardware and software applications, or out-designing and out-engineering Germans in making muscular cars and automated factory equipment.

Sanya University is ramping up international business education. Students there, like Zhang, try to learn as much as possible about foreign markets: their languages, cultural touchstones and more.

She is majoring in English, but her favourite courses have been in marketing. She works in her spare time as a guide for international conferences and sporting events to gain more exposure to native English speakers. She reads actively about automotive trends. And she brims with confidence about her ability to persuade New York City to buy Geely cars for taxis.

"The status of China is growing all the time; we've got a really important role in international markets," she said in fluent English. "We need the capability to communicate with foreigners."